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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Midweek News Roundup: 02/02/11

Happy Groundhogs' Day to our American readers.

Domestic News: In Georgia, lawmakers are proposing legislation to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks. Based on a similar law in Nebraska, the law would make the cutoff point the point after which science has proven that the unborn child can feel pain. Gov. Nathan Deal (R) indicated that he would sign the law if it comes across his desk. Pro-life legislators in Massachusetts are proposing new legislation to allow taxpayers to personally decide on whether their tax dollars go to fund abortions. How so? If the bill becomes law, taxpayers would be allowed to signal that the percentage of their income taxes that would normally be directed towards abortions or abortion counseling for low-income women, would instead be spent on public information campaign for the Baby Safe Haven Law. The Baby Safe Haven Law in Massachusetts allows parents to drop off unwanted newborns at hospitals, police, or fire stations.

International Opinion Piece: Samar Halarnkar of the Hindustan Times wrote a compelling editorial entitled "India's Silent Genocide." Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the article.

I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a vat of milk, sparking a custom

that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to a woman from the outside and the six men take turns raping her. Eventually more men in the village get involved. She is tied to the cow shed and gangraped every night.

Matrubhumi was excessively brutal, I thought, but it addressed a silent, growing genocide that emerging India prefers to ignore.

At least 1,370 girls are aborted every day in India. For perspective, some 250 Indians die every day in road accidents. Terrorists killed about six people, on an average, every day in 2009. In the last two decades of economic progress, 10 million girls have died before being born. More are strangled, slowly starved or simply tossed in the trash.

This is mass murder on a scale unseen in any other country this century. Only China runs us close. The overall Indian sex ratio should be at least 950 women to 1,000 men (Nature produces more males than females as boys are more vulnerable to infant diseases than girls). But the child sex ratio, the number of girls to every 1,000 boys in the age group zero to six, has dropped from 1,010 girls in 1941 to 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001, according to census figures. The 2011 census will reveal a further decline based on mostly disturbing trends.

Please read the entire article, it's a compelling look into the horror of gender selective abortions in India.

Discussion Topic: As many of you have seen, I'm a Maryland resident who lives near Baltimore City. As was pointed out over the weekend, a Judge ruled that anti-crisis pregnancy center laws enacted by the Baltimore City Council as unconstitutional. Are there any local legislative actions that you feel strongly about regarding life issues? If so, tell us about them!